According to the Internal Security Service (ISS), Estonia’s national agency for counterintelligence and high-profile corruption investigations, one of their officials was abducted at gunpoint at Luhamaa border checkpoint this morning where he was discharging service duties, and taken to Russia.

Correction: The deputy director of ISS said that it had been claimed to him by the Russian side that Kohver was alive and well, but no confirmation of that fact was available, or of Eston Kohver’s whereabouts.

Initially there was little indication it was necessarily more than an isolated criminal incident, but within several hours it had developed into a diplomatic row, with the Estonian and Russian intelligence agencies advancing cardinally opposite versions of the events.

FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service, has stated a different version of events in the case of the missing counterintelligence agent, saying they stopped a Estonian Internal Security Service (ISS) operation in the Pskov Oblast near the Estonian border, and arrested an ISS operative.